October 13, 2013

Top anims #126-129

One nice thing about exercise sequences is that they save a lot of animation cost by repeating frames. Another nice thing is that they make for nice top anims. These are from the second episode of Sekai de Ichiban.

October 11, 2013

Chooser version 38

Added 39 images from Hagure Yuusha. Total number is now 2691.

I actually watched it, all the way through, last night. It was better than I remembered. Akatsuki is still an arrogant perverted jerk, but not as annoying as I had remembered him being. And the plots swirling around him made somewhat more sense than I remembered.

But he's the star and he's on camera a large percentage of the time, and generally I don't use images including guys (though there have been rare exceptions). Plus, a large percentage of the scenes with girls and not with him or the other guys in the show featured levels of nudity that I generally don't use. So it was only 39 images, and about ten of those came from the OVAs.

UPDATE: His special technique where he removes a girl's underwear while fighting originally struck me as being completely gratuitous fan service.

Well, it still is. But it actually makes some sense. He isn't just doing it because it's sexy. It's also a way to end a fight with a girl without him having to beat her black-and-blue.

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Akatsuki is a decently thought out protagonist, but the LNs weren't well setup for being adapted to an anime. Thus, a lot of focus on the ecchi. I didn't mind too much, but they tried to do too much and it was just a mess of a story line.

Though humiliating his opposites into quitting is definitely within his normal operating setup. It's actually a good tactic.

As is often the case in shows like this, it suffers from far too much talking during battles. I would say that's the biggest failing in the show. It's an incompetent way to do plot exposition, but it works slightly better in print than it does on screen.

This also suffers from something that's common in low-budget chinese kung-fu movies: "Why didn't my special dragon poison kill you?" "Ha! My mongoose technique protects me against it if I use the right doubletalk approach!" and so on. It's kind of like called attacks, except far more talkie.

Akatsuki does a lot of that when he's doing magic-that-isn't-really-magic. It's a way to excuse deus-ex-machinas, except that in print you do it as part of the description of what's going on, rather than making someone voice it.

October 07, 2013

Chooser version 36

Back when I switched to using a flash for the top image, one request was that I allow people to store the image they were looking at. I can't do that directly out of the flash file because the flash security sandbox doesn't permit it. You either can manipulate local files, or you can manipulate files on the web, but you can't do both.

I never understood why anyone wanted this. But apparently some people did. And it just now occurred to me that I can give you something nearly as good, and I just implemented it. In the upper right corner now is another magic invisible button. If you click it, a new browser window or tab (depending on how your browser is set to treat target "_blank") opens with the current image in it, and from there you can drag-and-drop or right-click to your heart's content.

The lower right corner is a magic button which causes the flash file to choose a new image to display, on every click (for IE) or every other click (for Firefox). I still don't know why that doesn't work correctly for Firefox (and certain other browsers) and I still don't have the slightest idea how to fix it. I still believe it's a bug in Flash, and it won't change until Adobe does something about it. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

The lower left corner is a button that causes your browser to load the main page. The upper left corner acts like the lower right corner except that a mouse hover brings up a panel displaying a bunch of internal information about the flash.

UPDATE: If you're looking at an animation, the upper right button will open that in a new window/tab, too. But the animations are flash files themselves, so you can't drag-and-drop or right-click them to save them. Sorry; nothing I can do about that.

If you really need your own local copy, for some reason, then in Firefox you can open a new tab to "about:cache" and then dig it out of the file cache. There's no equivalent in IE; Microsoft thinks we're too stupid to be allowed into the cache and does its best to prevent us from getting into it.

UPDATE: And having written the above, I just now realized what I was doing wrong that was screwing up Firefox (and Chrome etc.) and fixed it. (Yes, it was my fault.) The lower right button should work every time now. At least it does in Firefox for me.

So the current version of Chooser is 37.

UPDATE: By the way, it's better now than before. Used to be, the top image was always named "top.jpg". But now it will have a unique name, so you don't have to rename it.

Of course, sometimes the name is something like "GuP.zip:0101.jpg" so you better hope that having a colon in the name doesn't screw up the operating system of your choice. (Windows doesn't mind, but I have no idea how MacOS handles that.)

I am dynamically allocating an object to hold the image to be displayed. But I was reloading it by using the same allocation code, without deallocating it first. The IE version of the Flash runtime evidently was saying, "OK, This isn't right but I know what you're trying to do, and I'll do it for you." The Firefox version seems to have used the new allocation as an indication that it should deallocate, but it didn't go beyond that. Then, the next time there wasn't any object, so it allocated it properly.

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Colons are illegal characters in filenames on Macs (hfs reserved them for path separators, not sure about hfs+ offhand), but Firefox and Safari replace them in the save dialog with an underscore or hyphen (respectively). I imagine Chrome does something similar, so Mac users should be good.

Thanks for the update.

Posted by: benzeen at October 07, 2013 07:58 PM (w1Fue)

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Actually, it looks like IE on Windows is replacing the colons with underscores, too.

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Hmmm, a common thing in IE, like when it used to ignore the lack of a /table tag, allowing bad HTML to display, while stricter browsers like Netscape wouldn't render the unclosed table. I would tell webmasters that their HTML was faulty, and they'd say "What do you mean? It works in Explorer." Fault-tolerance makes fault the standard.

I was about to post a 'thank you' for getting rid of the bad rubbish, when I clicked on the link to go to the individual post - and got the same pop-up from Sitemeter.

It has been very irritating to be forced to click to be rid of the pop-up whenever I have visited Ace of Spades and The Long War Journal (The latter, like your site, is usually very clean of webpage artifacts.) over the last day or so.

September 26, 2013

Sitemeter

Sitemeter rolled out something new this morning without warning, and every time I load this site, or any other that has a sitemeter bug on it, I get asked about some sort of analytics javascript. I have no idea what it is, and I didn't do it. I imagine Sitemeter is already being flooded with complaints, so I imagine whatever they did will get undone, or fixed, fairly soon.

Anyway, it's not my fault, but I apologize. If it keeps going on for a long time, I'll remove the sitemeter bug.

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I've abandoned and blocked (or maybe it's not blocked currently and I need to reblock) Sitemeter after I read this article about Sitemeter back in 2007, which concerned how Sitemeter was injecting code that would implant third party cookies for ad/tracking sites like SpecificClick

Seems like I just achieved it, my own self. Share me a shoulder to cry on, please. Time was, my serious posts got a lot of attention. But I've been consciously trying to shed that reputation (because it became a pain) and seems like I have succeeded too well; now I get ignored even when I don't want to be. Recently I've occasionally written something serious and sent it to Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spade HQ who posted it. But this last time, two days later I received an email from him saying he was on the road, and that he had forwarded it to something called "open blogger".

Whoever was the recipient (if indeed there was one) doesn't seem to have thought it was even worth acknowledging, and that's also the last I heard from Gabriel. He has since posted at least one article on Ace's, but didn't post mine.

I guess I'm a has-been. (sob. Pass me those hankies...)

The people at Ace of Spade HQ don't owe me anything, of course. It's their blog and they can post whatever the hell they want there, and omit whatever they think isn't up to their standards. But I would have at least hoped for an email telling me it was rejected, and I don't seem to even have rated that much consideration. I remember a song from when I was a kid:

It was just sort of a strange feeling. A few years ago people would spontaneously email me and invite me to post on their site, even if only rarely. I used to have posting privilege on Hot Air, for instance. For a while I posted on Chicago Boys, and for a while on RedState. And after Hot Air stopped letting outsiders post to the Green Room, Gabriel invited me to post on Ace of Space HQ.

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Not to get maudlin about it, but the USS Clueless is what led me to Allahpundit, Ace and Protein Wisdom way back when. After your post announcing you were stopping the USS Clueless, along with your reasons, I followed you here and that started me off on what became my favorite hobby/viewing pleasure.

After reading all the compliments you get when you do post on AoS, I would be surprised if there wasn't some kind of ball dropped somewhere.

No matter. I will read you here, there or wherever you happen to post.

Posted by: topmaker at September 01, 2013 08:10 AM (2yZsg)

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My blog cluster early on included Eject^3, Cox & Forkum, Michelle Malkin, and on occasion I'd hit USS Clueless (I don't recall if I ever commented). It also included a blog that shall not be mentioned any more.

I can't remember exactly where I started first and who led to whom.

It's probably inevitable that blogs fall by the wayside, but we're only just now seeing the end of the first generation or two, so it seems tragic. And even though Eject^3 has been allowed, through neglect, to turn into a swamp of SEO comments by spammers, John Cox still posts art on his own blog, and there are lots of new bloggers coming up who need to be sorted through.

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I read USS Clueless religiously, commented a few times, even sent a couple of e-mails, one of which became a post topic. It wasn't until you started Chizumatic, however, that I became a blogger. Yep, SDB's the closest thing I have to a blogfather.

The thing that led me to USS Clueless was the little article Steve wrote about CDMA versus GSM. That was both informative and entertaining, which is a magnificent combination. Since that time, I have gone on to other blogs like Powerline, Ace of Spades, My Pet Jawa, Tim Blair, and others.

I also tried blogging for a little bit - and it was hard enough especially when I had other things to do that I gave up on it entirely. Steve's move into anime blogging happened about the time I was getting seriously into anime, so that was a happy coincidence - though I generally read few anime blogs (Astronerdboy and Wonderduck, mostly.) or military blogs.

Having said that, it appears Ace has been having issues relating to comments and commentators in the past few days, and it highly likely that someone had dropped the ball somewhere. Or maybe one of the less admirable cobloggers decided to play games with it, but we will give him the benefit of the doubt...